1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for playing back a plurality of pieces of music recorded on a recording medium, and more particularly to a method for randomly playing back a plurality of pieces of music recorded on a recording medium such as a digital audio disc and an audio tape.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The so-called multi-disk player has recently been developed to which a plurality of magazines are detachably mounted. Each magazine holds therein a plurality of digital audio disks each records a plurality of pieces of music to be played back in a suitable manner such as a sequential manner in which a plurality of the disks are sequentially played back in the order of their original arrangement (hereinafter referred to the sequential playback). A programmed manner in which a plurality of the disks are played back in a predetermined sequence different from the order of their original arrangement, which is hereinafter referred to as the programmed playback). A random playback mode based on random-numbers which may be generated by using a table of random numbers or the like is hereinafter referred to as the randomly-selected playback.
In case of the randomly-selected playback being produced in the multi-disk player, a piece of music having been already played back may be selected again in producing playbacks since a piece of music is randomly selected in accordance with a random-number source such as the table of random numbers. Therefore, in order to prevent the same piece of music from being played back again, identification numbers, or alphabets etc., for identifying a plurality of pieces of music having been already played back (hereinafter referred to as the playback-completion identification numbers) are sequentially stored in a memory of the multi-disk player, to make it possible to randomly select a subsequent piece of music to be played back among a plurality of pieces of music the playback-completion identification numbers of which are still not stored in the memory of the multi-disk player. In some multi-disk player, the user can previously designate some pieces of music as undesirable ones requested not be to played back, through a delete-designation procedure. Identification numbers for identifying such undesirable ones will be hereinafter referred to as the playback-inhibition identification numbers which are stored in the memory of the multi-disk player to make it possible to randomly select a subsequent piece of music to be played back among a plurality of pieces of music which do not correspond to any playback-inhibition identification numbers which are stored in the memory of the multi-disk player.
Hitherto, in the multi-disk player providing the above-mentioned random selections, both of the playback-inhibition identification numbers and the playback-completion identification numbers are stored in the same region of the memory of the multi-disk player, so that the entire informations having been stored in the memory are cleared from the memory upon completion of the randomly-selected playback. As a result, in case of performing the randomly-selected playback again (hereinafter referred to as the repeat randomly-selected playback), it is necessary for the operator to perform the above-mentioned delete-designation procedure again. However, such procedure is very cumbersome. This has been a disadvantage inherent to the conventional multi-disk player.